I have a favorite ritual at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and it has nothing to do with synagogue, seeing family or even eating special foods. For the last eight years, I’ve participated in Reboot’s 10Q, an online platform for participants to answer one question per day in their “own secret online space.” The questions are introspective, retrospective and aspirational, encouraging reflection on some of the bigger questions in life, but responses can be silly as well as serious, playful as well as deep. The ten questions are sent every day of the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) and, at the end of the period, the participant’s answers are sent to “the vault.” One year later, just before Rosh Hashanah, they receive an email reminding them what they wrote last year, and they can see how far they’ve come, before starting all over again with their answers for this year.

The questions are the same every year, but I’m never in exactly the same spot twice. Concerns may come up over and over again (“I wish I’d spent more time with my family,” “I’m not sure I’m fulfilling my potential,” “Can I find the kind of community I am looking for?”) but circumstances and the details change, and it’s possible to track progress over the years.

Time in Judaism is not just a cycle, though we go through the same holidays year after year and may have our favorite family traditions and quirks. It’s the repetition – of blessings, foods, family gatherings, questions asked – that helps mark our movement through life. It’s not a circle but a spiral.

The secular new year in Western culture heavily loads the celebration aspect, while resolutions are made quickly as a kind of after thought. December 31st comes and passes, and those resolutions often fall by the wayside in January. The Jewish new year is stretched out, with the reflection traditionally starting in Elul, the Jewish month preceding Rosh Hashanah, and blasts of the shofar (ram’s horn) sounded to wake us from our stale habits and unawareness. We celebrate with friends and family on the new year itself, and then we throw ourselves back into thinking about who we are and who we want to be.

It’s also becoming easier to find ways into meaningful reflection. One thing I love about 10q is its universal relevance and accessibility. You don’t have to be Jewish to participate, none of its language would alienate those who are not, and its questions can be applied to anyone. There are other great initiatives online that mean you don’t have to sit in synagogue (though that can be a powerful part of your practice) to aspire to change for the better this Rosh Hashanah. At the Oshman Family JCC, we are participating in the 92nd Street Y’s #NewYearPrayer campaign on social media, through which individuals and communities share their highest goals for themselves and the wider world. Friends of mine have been posting throughout the month with the hashtag #reflect4rosh, sharing any moment of deeper realization or meaning that strikes them over this period. Or there’s eScapegoat, a kind of online “Jewish confession,” where people can own up (anonymously) to the things they feel they’ve done wrong over the last year.

Social media and the internet often get a bad rap as amplifiers of ego and sources of isolation. But they can connect us – to ourselves and each other. This year, use any of these easy tools to help you think about what’s important, maybe stick a hashtag on it, check out what others are doing under the same hashtag, and see how you can be part of a worldwide wave of people, improving themselves and the communities around them.

I returned a couple weeks ago from leading Shalhevet, a two-week journey through Poland and Israel to educate Bay Area high school juniors and seniors on “the history, heritage and future of the Jewish people.” A more intimate trip than March of the Living, which gathers thousands of teenagers from around the world, Shalhevet similarly featured visits to Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek death camps, to learn about the horrors perpetrated there by the Nazis. It was without a doubt a powerful experience for our whole group.

Yet, as one of the two educational leaders this year, I have an admission to make: I am not, or at least have not been, a “Holocaust” kind of Jew. What could I mean by that? Simply this: the Shoah has never seemed to me a good reason, in and of itself, to be Jewish. I have never been convinced that the events of 1933 to 1945 constitute an attractive or meaningful foundation for a Jewish identity.

When I was living in London in my 20s, I set up a Moishe House in that city – a young adult Jewish community that my friends and I ran out of our own home – and I went onto work for the wider Moishe House organization, mentoring inspiring young Jewish leaders from around the world. In September last year I took up the challenge to innovate in the Jewish Community in Silicon Valley to create a positive Jewish identity for the 21st Century through my work at the Oshman Family JCC. Neither of these projects, Moishe House and my work in Palo Alto, require looking backwards to justify going on.

Here in the Bay Area, where start-ups may be born one day and disappear the next, where design-thinking is key and technology moves culture faster than any attempt to plan or understand, it would seem the perfect place to put this philosophy of Jewish expression into practice.

So what sense could I make of 14 teenagers (Generation Z, short attention spans, right?) signing up to go to Poland and Israel, choosing with clear intention to learn about the history of the Holocaust and what it might mean for them as Jews today and tomorrow?

The Shalhevet participants took their responsibility to learn from the past very seriously. At each historical site we visited in Poland, a different student presented his or her thoughts, reflections and ideas to the rest of the group. All of them took time to speak with AnneMarie, our accompanying survivor who escaped the Holocaust when she was hidden as a child in a Catholic monastery in Belgium, and who charmed and inspired every member of our group.

At the museum that is now part of Auschwitz, they looked up the names of relatives who perished in the Shoah, to understand how their lives and their families are connected.

They spoke about the need to oppose antisemitism and indeed all forms of racism, and how what they had learned would affect them and how they live their lives.
They also showed a capacity for understanding and holding great complexity – meeting Jewish young adults who live in Poland today and involve themselves in activities at the Krakow JCC; speaking to non-Jewish Polish teens about growing up in Poland and how they relate to Jews; and learning about 1000 years of Polish Jewish life at the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in Warsaw.

And then they took that understanding into a new context, as we moved onto Israel, traveling from the desert to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the foundations of the Jewish state. They went to Yad Vashem and held a ceremony for AnneMarie’s rescuer, who is commemorated there.

So now we are back in the Bay and I have time to reflect, what are my views on Holocaust education, bearing witness, and its significance for Jewish life and identity today?

It is clear to me that it is not necessary to base the whole of a Jewish identity on the Shoah, or give up belief in a progressive, creative Jewish life, in order to be able to learn about and from the past, and to remember.

Before the Shoah, Poland was the seat of Jewish innovation. There is Jewish innovation there today, in its tiny community, on a much smaller scale. These are important complexities to hold, as we move forwards into our uncertain, but exciting, Jewish future.

I am left with a sense of pride in Shalhevet – in the spirit and application of its participants – and hope for where we are going.

The rabbis of Jewish tradition liked a good pun. So when it came to Purim, the great Jewish holiday of jokes and merrymaking, they decided to play around with its name. Oddly enough though they claimed that the holiday is deeply connected to Yom Kippur. “Yom,” in Hebrew, means “Day,” while “Kippur” generally means “Atonement;” but “ki” can mean “like” and “Pur” is the root of the word “Purim,” the lottery by which, according to the story, the wicked Haman chose the date he wished to get rid of all the Jews. So the ancient rabbis said, “Don’t call Yom Kippur ‘the Day of Atonement’ but rather ‘a day like Purim.’ “

This was one of the texts we looked at recently with the Jewish Studio Project, as they led their “Masking and Unmasking for Purim” session for adults at the Oshman Family JCC. Rather than simply party, it was a chance to prepare for the holiday and look deeper into Purim.

We found out that the holiday can be seen as the raucous carnival flip-side to Yom Kippur’s sombre sobriety, and that somehow both approaches are needed over the course of the year. We also looked into Purim’s themes of hiddenness, disguise and reversal, and finished by making masks of our own, deciding what kind of personas we wished to represent and take on through our art.

It may all sound very serious, but in fact it had that perfect combination of play and reflection. As we got messy with glue, glitter, feathers, paint and cardstock, making our masks, we also tried combinations of wine and hamentashen, the special triangular cookies we eat on Purim.

It was the first time that the Oshman Family JCC collaborated with the Jewish Studio Project, an innovative organization from the East Bay that aims to activate “creativity in individuals and communities to reclaim Jewish values, make meaning in our lives and restore hope to the world.” It is rare to experience something at once so fun and educational. Look out for more from Jewish Studio Project in the future—going by their Purim workshop, we are already looking forward to welcoming them here again.

Happy Purim everyone!

We are about to celebrate Simchat Torah, the Jewish holiday when we complete the annual cycle of reading the Torah and start all over again. “In the beginning God created…”

Famously, the first chapter of the Torah says that God created the human being “in His own image.” That means we are all creative beings! My task, as the new Director of Jewish Innovation for the JCC, is to get creative with Jewish life and, if you’re up for it, help you get creative with it, too.

Jewish innovation takes place when we bring our Jewish lenses to bear on our greatest passions and interests in the world, and vice versa. Traditionally, Jewish programming may have set out to make “Jewish” someone’s primary identity. These days, most of the really exciting, creative and inspiring Jewish projects, organizations and initiatives recognize that we are multifaceted human beings with multiple identities, living in a varied and complex world. So instead of asserting “Jewish” above those different interests and identities, we bring them all together to see what exciting chidush (innovation) emerges:

What can Jewish texts and wisdom teach us about nature and the environment, and what can nature and the environment teach us about Judaism? (You can find out through our Family Hikes or our Farm to Table Food Festival.)

How can we express our Jewish values through direct service, and let our social justice work teach us how to be Jewish? (Mitzvah Day’s coming up on January 18^th and/or you can get involved in our Mitzvah Corps!)

How are Jewish artists expressing their identity and engagement with Jewish wisdom through their art, and what can the Jewish tradition teach us about the artistic process? (We have an amazing program of world-class Jewish performances, debates and workshops, and a School for the Performing Arts for you to explore these questions.)

Keep checking our calendar of events as we add more and more opportunities to create and experience innovative expressions of Jewish life at the OFJCC. In the meantime, we’re asking you “How Do You Do Jewish?” Reply below or email me your answers at jstanley@paloaltojcc.org. It’s an open invitation to tell us what we can create here, to help you do Jewish your way.